12-28-2016, 02:07 PM
(12-28-2016, 08:19 AM)Odin Wrote: These Fascist lunatics are a threat to a free society. They are exactly the type Popper was talking about when he said that we might have to suppress the intolerant to preserve a tolerant society.
When those kooks have power to destroy someone's academic career because that person's politics are with a large minority (let alone with the majority) then we have a big problem. If someone is using the power to grade as a means of getting students to flunk out for disagreeing with the teacher on political or cultural issues, then such is terribly wrong.
I can imagine those "fascist lunatics" establishing right-wing, American equivalents of Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution that differ from those in Cuba only in the object of support. Liberty depends upon a culture of rationality, decency, and tolerance. Sure, this is America, and it can't happen here. Much the same was said in Germany. Guess what -- Germany became a land of dread of the well-connected and powerful before it started on its course of genocide and military aggression. As Germany became a police state in the mid-1930s its once-renowned universities became diploma mills.
If I were a college teacher I might get into trouble for describing Donald Trump as a demagogue and suggesting that demagogues always bring political calamity because they ultimately make contradictory promises that they must betray while stoking anger at 'the Establishment' and fostering extremism that never has a wide appeal once it is shown. Of course I would use Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Juan Peron as examples, along with Hitler and Mussolini.
As the Republican Party increasingly begins to show affinities with such extremist groups as the Birch Society and the President lacks the spine to contest the bigoted David DuKKKe, and it begins to act as if it is the only political game in town, we have the potential of the demise of democracy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.